After checking with the relevant parties, MySQL has just submitted an application for the Google Summer of Code 2009. We’ve successfully participated in SoC during 2007, and 2008, and we’re hoping to get another shot at SoC, for our third year running.

What is Summer of Code? It means different things to many different people. If you’re a student, it means you get to hack on MySQL and the related products, and churn out code, that over eleven million people use, while you sit on the beach in your bathers! And when successful, you get a nice wad of cash even!

If you’re a mentor, it means having someone to help you write features, you’ve been wanting — someone to spend a good fourty-hours per week, hacking …

phpMyAdmin and MySQL Forge, along with the MySQL Build Farm initiative were the main MySQL related benefactors of Google Summer of Code 2008. phpMyAdmin got BLOB Streaming support and a simplified setup script, MySQL Forge got RSS and Atom feeds and the MySQL Build Farm got a test schedule.

Directly mentored by phpMyAdmin originator Marc Delisle, GSoC student Raj Kissu Rajandran completed the BLOB streaming support in phpMyAdmin. This is how he describes his project goals (which are now achieved):

It is often common to come across a website, especially a blog, that is built on a pairing of MySQL and PHP. Seeing as how most of those who run such websites on the Internet do not have access to a Shell account or have experience in managing applications from the command-line, …

Whether an online comic, or not, the New Straits Times is one of the three English dailies, that still cost some amount of money in Malaysia. Their Computimes pullout, now better known as Tech&U, featured Raj Kissu, a Summer of Code 2008 participant for MySQL. While the article itself, fails to mention MySQL, he describes what he’s working on:

I?m doing a project on binary large objects in database. Basically, it is aimed at allowing people to file or stream files online. The program is based on open source.

Kudos to Raj, kudos to Google, kudos to phpMyAdmin, and kudos to MySQL. As for the reporter, as usual, old medium journalism tends to be somewhat of a fail….

This column obfuscation scheme is designed so that information can be gathered about the query and underlying schema, by just looking at the query. You will be able to tell if it is using keys correctly just by looking at the column names in the query.

Column Name Obfuscation 

1. Table Prefix Columns of a table will be prefixed with a abbreviation or (from a list of random names that can be selected from a list following a theme or something) of the Obfuscated table name (when I tackle joins this will resolve and conflict in names that are going to occur)
   
2. Column Type, undecided on whether or not to just go with simplified names like (str|int|float|bin) or go with the full data type (i.e BININT,BLOB,DECIMAL,VARCHAR,TEXT…).
   

3. Keys, P[0-9] numbers are only for multi value PRIMARY KEYS.

   …

I'll be using this blog to keep the community and anyone interested in updates on my Google Summer of Code Project.The initial ideas for the project are available here MySQL Obfuscator. 
I'll developing it for PHP >= 5.1. The simplified working of it will be that it takes query's and a DB connection, gathers information about schema and rewrites the query and DDL for related tables.

I've got some ideas about the Schema renaming scheme that i will post here in the next day or two, I would like to get some feed back on the scheme, so feel free to poke holes in my ideas early. I would also like to hear any other input.

MySQL is featured on the Google Open Source Blog
Just after leaving JavaOne, Leslie pinged me on IRC to inform me that the MySQL project was featured on the Google Open Source blog. Go on, read Moments of Inspiration.

In other news from mentors, Colin Charles, former mentor and 2008 organization administrator for MySQL dropped a note to let us know that their Community Bonding period is moving along swimmingly. So well, in fact, that their students are already delivering weekly status reports. Colin mentioned that …

A bit late in the game, but maybe somebody would be interested in working on this proposed project of mine:

PlanetMySQL currently is merely an aggregator of submitted RSS feeds, with some functionality for filtering content to keep the discussion on topic. Due to its high volume of posts, many gems get "lost in the noise" and are hard to retrieve.

We'd like to expand the functionality of PlanetMySQL significantly to provide more possibilities for community participation and interaction. For this project, we are looking for a talented PHP hacker to set up a site that provides the current functionality and more:

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